McNair Scholars Summer Research

From the perspective of architectural phenomenology, our built environments have a greater influence on us than we realize. They have an impact on our physical, emotional, and psychological well-being, particularly now as we spend the majority of our time indoors. These spaces inform our habits, moods, and behaviors, as well as our perspectives on everyday life. The meanings and experiences we gain from this interaction strengthen not only our relationships with others, but also our relationships with our surroundings.

This paper aims to explore the history of black student activism at St. Lawrence University starting in 1968 leading up to the activism that the Black Laurentian Initiative is doing today. Recent black student social justice activism was indirectly born from the activism that students did in the 1960s and 70s. I will be exploring what methods of activism seemed to be effective, and which seemed to be ineffective.

Technological advancements, in particular the widespread use of sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft, have prompted the rise of the gig economy, which is a labor market characterized by short-term (flexible) employment for people who are unemployed or need more than one occupation. This paper explores how the rise of the gig economy affects workers' livelihoods and the evolvement of the U.S. labor market.

Ordinarily, when we think about disagreement, we think about disagreeing with others. Interpersonal disagreement is essentially about dissimilarity, but what would it mean for the self to be dissimilar? For Heidegger, care is the structure of Dasein, and the structure of care is the “ahead-of-itself.” For Sartre, the self is separated from its being by the nothingness positioned between the two. Modern existentialism rests on the proposition that we are perpetually other than ourselves, but what is disagreement aside from otherness?

Long-runout landslides, though uncommon on Earth, are prevalent throughout the solar system and well-preserved on Mars due to low rates of erosion. Although mineral composition, specifically presence of clay minerals, has been found to be an important predictor variable in susceptibility models of highly mobile terrestrial landslides (Lee and Min, 2001; Van Den Eeckhaut et al., 2006; Yalcin, 2007), most studies of Martian landslides have not directly considered composition (Watkins et al., 2020).

Approximately sixty percent of the world's refugee population lives in urban cities and towns across the globe, a number expected to grow under increased climate change. In the United States, many refugees receive welfare support and participate in resettlement programs to rebuild their lives in America. Nevertheless, they also often find themselves embroiled in the systemic inequality that defines urban areas through legacies of racial segregation and structural xenophobia.

To further our understanding of the evolution of the universe, particularly the distribution of dark matter creating the cosmic web of galaxies and clusters, we need to determine distances to galaxies. The peak luminosities of Type Ia supernovae can be determined from their consistent light curves. Therefore, analysis of Type Ia supernovae within galaxies results in estimates of the distance modulus, a parameter that can be used to determine the distance of a supernova and its host galaxy. This estimate is impacted by the environment of a given supernova.

Metamorphosis is a post-embryotic process of development for many amphibians, such as Xenopus laevis tadpoles, to mature into an adult form. This process is accompanied by the rise of thyroid hormones and studies indicate that the increase in exogenous thyroid levels can induce metamorphosis prematurely. Inhibition of this hormone will terminate metamorphosis or stop the initiation of it. During this process, many physiological changes occur on the cellular level. The tadpole experiences programmed cell death, cell proliferation, and organ remodeling.

The experimental goal is to study the roles of two hormones in frog immune system development. Frogs are unique among vertebrates since during metamorphosis the tadpole immune system is destroyed and replaced by a new adult immune system. This experiment had four groups of pre-metamorphic tadpoles. The first was an untreated/control group. The second was exposed to dexamethasone (Dex), a pharmacological glucocorticoid analog. The third was treated with thyroid hormone, T3. The fourth was exposed simultaneously to both hormones, which happens during natural metamorphosis.

How does the lottery drawing system work? Is it true that the winning numbers, as well as each individual digit, were chosen at random? This project uses R Studio to investigate two of New York’s most popular lottery drawing games to see if the numbers picked are as random as the Lottery Commission claims. This was achieved by applying Chi-Square of Goodness test to determine p-values and identify whether or not there is evidence that the numbers are not drawn randomly.

Throughout the summer of 2020, I spent the majority of my time crafting my novel, Generation Beta. I read and researched an array of different topics from history, the craft of writing, all the way to the psychology of the human brain. I worked with my mentor, Professor J. Michael Martinez, who is also a published poet and has written many non-fiction pieces. He managed the vast amount of research and help connect all of it by directing where to go next. While during this research, I plotted and wrote away, applying the things I was learning every day.

This case study provides a specific overview of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe’s lawsuit against the chemical production giant Monsanto (now Bayer). The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe is located in Akwesasne at the crossroads between the borders of the settler provinces of Ontario and Quebec and the settler state of New York. They have endured the effects of Monsanto’s production of Polychlorinated Biphenyls and the fact that they became a pollutant in the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribes' main water source, the St. Lawrence River Watershed.

The universe is vast, yet only five percent of it consists of tangible matter. A large portion of the universe is made of dark matter and its structure is governed by the distribution of it, yet there is uncertainty as to what this entity is. For this research, thirteen galaxies and their velocities, flux, and Hubble distances are presented. Thirty-seven sets of observation data were reduced utilizing a package of functions written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) specifically for the measurement of a galaxy’s neutral-hydrogen profile.

There are recent concerns with how honeybees are impacted by neonicotinoids, a class of neuro-active insecticides that are chemically similar to nicotine. However, it remains largely unknown how and to what extent neonicotinoids impact wild bee species, especially in the United States. Wild bees play a major role in pollination, so it is vital to develop more research on possible effects of neonicotinoids on wild bees. This study aimed to determine the geographic areas in the United States where neonicotinoids have the potential to cause a decline in wild bee populations.

Previous research suggests that consistent preference for smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later rewards is associated with a host of maladaptive health-related behaviors. Non-human and humans studies have shown that chronic exposure to immediate rewards increases the consistent preference for smaller, sooner rewards. For all experiments, human participants were exposed to acute delay exposure via a series of surveys based on assigned conditions: delay exposure, immediate exposure, or standard control.

Food Security is an urgency in developing countries. Africa is the leading continent with the highest level of severe food insecurity. In recent years, Kenya has been a prime example of a benefactor of foreign direct investment (FDI). How does foreign direct investment inflows affect host countries’ food security? Research on modernization and dependency theories offer debate on the multilateral effect of FDI. I expand on these theories by examining the effect of the three sectors in FDI pertaining to: natural resources, manufacturing goods and industry-specific services.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that causes neuronal loss and characterized to have the histopathological hallmarks of β-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. The current hypotheses for the etiology and treatment of AD were deduced from these hallmarks, centering on proteopathic cascade hypotheses such as the β-amyloid cascade hypothesis and the phosphorylated-tau hypothesis.

The ongoing pandemic has triggered a notable social and economic crisis around the globe. As of July 7, COVID-19 has taken over 133,000 lives nationwide, but the effect has been disproportional. Data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows racial and ethnic disparities between those affected by the virus.

This project involves writing a grant proposal for research that will be a component of a NASA Future Investigators in Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) project called “Compositional and Thermophysical Controls on Martian Mass Movements,” by Helen Eifert '18.

The purpose of this research is to understand how international students experience psychological sense of community on American college campuses. In light of recent crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the literature reviewed on the international student experience is applied to understand the specific consequences this population faced during the pandemic, and to provide an understanding for their experiences during other forms of crisis.